FlyAnglers.org

A Story from Doug Gilmore's Turtle Series

Fly fishing, for most of its adherents, is an opportunity to slow down, to reach into the past and to touch history. To be sure, there are those who claim they choose fly fishing solely as a more efficient way to fish in certain circumstances, particularly to obnoxiously picky trout that seem to only have appetites for miniscule insects. The “lure” you must use in such cases is a fly, tied with thread, perhaps a bit of fur or synthetic substitute, and a finely wrapped feather from genetically engineered roosters, descended from fighting cocks. The fly is so tiny, with bodies scarcely larger than the wire diameter of the hook shank, that fishing with a fly rod is the only real way to do it. Oh, some folk use a spinning rod and a bobber with the fly tied some distance on an unweighted line below the bobber, but this is unwieldy and is an abomination. Besides, the contraption makes such a loud splash when the rig hits the water that any respectable fish will flee to the farthest reaches of the pool, if not the next county. If you want to fish that way, I’ll look the other way – after all, the only fish you’ll likely catch are truly stupid and you’ll be doing the entire genus of trout a favor by ridding its populace of such idiots. But it is an abomination and an embarrassment; sort of like your Uncle Bob who still wears his ‘70’s lime green leisure suit to funerals.

I realize there are some people who will read what I just wrote and write me off as a snob. You can usually recognize such folk; they’re the ones who ride around with those decals of a cartoon character whizzing on some car logo or some such thing. So be it. My friend Turtle’s grandfather, the Major, taught Turtle and me early on that you are judged as much by the folks who dislike you as you are by the company you keep. It was the Major who taught us to fish with a fly rod and it was the Major who taught us to be men. The fly fishing instruction was easy; the being a man part was tough. It’s not polite in some circles these days to use such phrases as “be a man”. Some folk write it off as chauvinistic. Perhaps it is. I don’t give a damn. Such folk should hang out with leisure suited Uncle Bob for awhile and maybe they’d get over their sensitivity.

When I was 14 years old, I went to live with Turtle. It was the third greatest blessing of my life, only surpassed by the birth of my children and the day my wife married me. It was at the end of the longest summer of my life, 1966; a summer where I had buried my mother, whose heart had finally broken after my father had gone to jail one too many times. Turtle’s father, the county sheriff, had personally escorted my father from the jail to the funeral service. After the service, my father went back to jail and the Sheriff took me into his house to live with him and his family at the Creek Place.

The Creek Place is still beautiful, but for a 14 year old boy from a troubled family, who had lived his life moving from place to place, one step ahead of the bill collectors, it was magical, a place of endless surprises and life-changing peace. Turtle’s family had settled there in the 1830’s, shortly after General Jackson had sent the Cherokee to Oklahoma. Some of the local Cherokee didn’t make the trip west – they avoided Jackson’s soldiers by disappearing into the hidden hollows of the mountains. Later, some Cherokee children married white folks. Most of us who were born in CherohowlaCounty have more than a bit of Cherokee in our blood lines.

Turtle’s ancestors were shrewd in the land they chose to homestead. In choosing what was to later be named “the Creek Place”, they picked acres and acres of Chestnut, Oak, Hickory and Poplar dominated wooded lands set interspersed with limestone ridges, beyond which rose the flanks of the southern end of the great Appalachian Mountains. Through it all, were (and is) a myriad of stream of cascades and still pools, filled (then) with flashes of olive golden, white tipped finned brook trout. The brook trout have long since retreated to further back into the mountains, following the example of the Cherokee, fleeing the invasion of red slashed silver tourists from the West and their somber brownish gold German cousins.

Three generations of Wallaces lived there in 1966, with Turtle’s grandfather, the Major, reigning as Pater Familia over it all. The Major served with Pershing in The Great War, the first Wallace to leave the United States since the clan had migrated to this country, from Scotland by way of Ireland. The Wallaces, like my people, the Macphersons, spent a few generations in Ireland before looking for more civil pastures in the New World, first settling around Lancaster, Pennsylvania and, then, trekking southward to the land the Cherokee called Tan-e-see.

After the war, the Major asked for and received his discharge from Pershing while still in France. He spent a year touring the old homeland of Scotland, becoming the first man in Cherohowla County to learn the art of fly fishing. He returned to America and fished from New York to what was left of the Wild West, before finally returning home to the Creek Place. We never asked him why he had spent a year bumming around Scotland or why he’d played cowboy, but I suspect it was to find and touch something in his past and to soften the scars of the wounds of war.

So it was that I came to be taught that children fish with worm, bobber and pole and the masses chase fish with gaudy contraptions of blades and balsa and propellers or, heaven help us, plastic worms or kernels of field corn. But men of substance (the Major’s words) fished with long rods and silken lines and feathered and furred flies. We were fourteen, Turtle and I, still children in the eyes of the law, but in the Major’s world we were young men and we would fish like young men and he would teach us.

The writer Norman Maclean, another descendant of displaced Scots, wrote of being taught to fly fish by his Presbyterian minister father that fly fishing was a Calvinistic duty, performed to a four count rhythm.

The Major was not a Calvinist. The Major’s curriculum was Baptist through and through with no room for ideas of pre-destination and firmly in the camp of Free-Will. The Major’s syllabus was built on the concept of the individual finding his own rhythm.

The Major was a “mule” man, meaning that he loathed horses, which he said were among God’s dumbest of animals, animals that would let a rider literally run it to death. The mule, on the other hand took the best of athletic ability of a horse, the endurance and judgment of a donkey and combined it with its own self-awareness. The result, according to the Major, was an animal that could outrun any horse while having the sense to stop before it keeled over. The Major would wax on and on, given half a chance, on how a mule instinctively knew its own limitations, how no man could teach a mule how to run, or how to plow or how to live, but that the mule was smart enough to figure this out for himself. And so it was that we learned to cast a fly rod. Later, both Turtle and I decided that part of the reason that a Mule was so much smarter than a horse was due to the fact that the Mule was never bothered with ideas about sex, but that is another story for another day.

The Major was, however, adamant that fly fishing was much more than knowing how to cast. He was the Professor Emeritus of Opportunity and taught us, his ready students, that dilettantes may worship flies riding high on hackled points in the film and that degenerate Englishmen may believe in the ritual of the Wet Fly, but men of Free-Will understood that trout should be fed flies that worked. Thus Turtle and I were expected to become proficient in all three forms of fly fishing - dry, wet and that oft-maligned craft of nymph fishing.

I  cannot say that we were good students of the Major. Turtle generally fishes one type of fly only, the Yallarhammer, a cross between a wet fly and a nymph, a fly born in the Southern Appalachians, invented by some hillbilly who, like the Major, decided that fishing with worms was for children. The Yallarhammer has a yellow-furred nymphal body, likely originally tied with the urine-stained underbelly fur of a goat, with a progressive wrap of peacock herl. The tail is formed of feather barbs clipped from the wing feathers taken from a bird mountain folk call the Yallarhammer, more properly named a yellow flicker, a woodpecker of sorts. The fly is palmer hackled with a split wing from the flicker, with the end result being swept-back individual feather barbs that undulate while being stripped across a likely pool, or, if you saturate the fly with floatant (or, as we did as kids, with Vaseline), can be fished dead-drift as a dry emerger, floating in the film. Some folks claim the original was much simpler than this, with no underbody fur, or a very thin fur underbody, or with only a peacock body or, alternately, with a fur body and no peacock herl, but all agree on the palmered hackle. Personally, I believe the original fly could have been either way, for peacocks, while not native to America, certainly were not uncommon on farms, even in the South. Farmers, or maybe more appropriately, the wives of farmers, have always like the beauty of peacocks. At any rate, there has not been a fish born in American fresh water that Turtle cannot catch with a Yallarhammer. I have watched him catch carp, bass, catfish, bream, trout, crappie and even, once, a hellbender, on a Yallarhammer (and that doesn’t include a certain beaver that Turtle once snagged unknowingly).

As for me, while I fish the Yallarhammer, I am more of a Free-Willer, as instructed by the Major, but nowhere as accomplished or as skilled as the old soldier had been when he was alive. I’ll fish whatever it takes, as long as it resembles a fly, to catch a fish. It’s not because I’m smarter than Turtle, or that I took to the Major’s instruction better than he did, but rather because I am cursed with bad luck when it comes to fishing and I figure I need every advantage I can use.

The Major died in 1969, two days after Turtle took a hand-off from Jerry Bob Whitestone and, behind the best block I ever made either in a game or in my imagination, ran for 72 yards to score the winning touchdown that brought the only state championship (not including livestock) Cherohowla High School has ever won. He had known that death was coming; a cancer had started in his prostate and had gone on from there. The stubbornness and pride that his ancestors had willed him kept him from allowing the doctors from using him for practice sessions in surgery. He had prepared us for his death by taking us fishing for a full week, loading us into his truck, the truck Turtle still drives, a 1957 Chevrolet ½ ton, and driving us to the Little Tennessee River, well north of our county, to what was, in the Major’s world, the grandest trout river in the world.

He was not his old self on that trip. He could not walk far because of the pain and he slept in the bed of the truck while we slept in the tent, for at night the pain was the worst. But every day we fished and we caught trout. Oh, what trout we caught: brook trout in feeder streams and, sometimes, in the river itself. Big brown trout that the Major said fought with the same doggedness the Hun had fought in the Marne during the Great War. Rainbows, whorish in their bright red and pinkish side dressings, and who leaped, according to the Major, like the dancing girls the Major had seen in the Moulin Rouge after the Armistice. And every night, the Major told us stories and talked about life and told us what good men we would be when we grew up and how proud he was of both of us.

The fourth day, a Thursday, was the best day. He, the Major, was fishing a triple rig of wet flies, with what I seem to remember was led by a Leadwing Coachman, followed by an Alder, with a Yallarhammer trailer. He was fishing a wide pool that lay below a dairy farm. I still see that pool in my mind’s eye, with the tall stone silo reaching to the sky, with the old man standing, casting, occasionally stripping and then letting the line swing.

On the Major’s seventh cast, the Lord exercised His Own Free-Will and sent the Behemoth to dine on the Major’s menu. The Major was in the midst of a tiny strip when the Behemoth hit. We watched the Major lift his rod and the bamboo shaft bent hard and the fish started to run with with the power of the fish pulsing and pulling the rod downward. The Major’s arm muscles fought against the force, using what little energy he had left in his body.

The fish ran downstream and then up, with the Major moving with it, keeping the line taut, stripping line when needed and giving line when called on. Seven times, that fish came towards the major. Six times, the Behemoth of the Little Tennessee turned away. But on the seventh turn, after the greatest battle ever fought between angler and trout, the Major slipped his net beneath the Behemoth and lifted to the sky a trout for the ages – a Brown Trout that, when laid next to the Major’s Payne 101 rod, extended from the reel seat to a full dollar bill’s length beyond the first guide – 31 inches of angry German trout soldier felled by the ancient Major.

The Little Tennessee was dammed by idiots and a fly fishing President in 1978, and with it died the Major’s grand river. Occasionally, I will drive up to what is now a god-forsaken lake. I will stop the car and look out over the stilled water and see the silo that still stands. The silo stands up through the water like a water-founded missile silo, a sentinel over the now submerged pool where the Major took the last great fish of Tennessee. As I stand there, I remember the Major and how he made my life worth living and how he taught me the greatest lesson that I have ever learned.

“We all choose our own road.”

© Doug Gilmore March 2004

About the Author...Doug Gilmore of Adaire, GA, was instrumental in the founding of GOTC gatherings and their support of Casting for Recovery. Besides fly fishing, Doug enjoys bird hunting, woodworking and fine scotch.